Monday, March 18, 2013

"Imagine that it is your professional duty to report a cost-benefit analysis of liberalizing immigration policy. You wouldn’t dream of producing a study that counted “men only” or “whites only,” at least not without specific, clearly stated reasons for dividing the data.
So why report cost-benefit results only for United States citizens or residents, as is sometimes done in analyses of both international trade and migration? The nation-state is a good practical institution, but it does not provide the final moral delineation of which people count and which do not."

Now what if he wrote:

"Imagine that it is your professional duty to report a cost-benefit analysis of a change to Medicare or Medicaid. You wouldn’t dream of producing a study that counted “men only” or “whites only,” at least not without specific, clearly stated reasons for dividing the data.
So why report cost-benefit results only for United States citizens or residents, as is done in analyses of both Medicare and Medicaid? The nation-state is a good practical institution, but it does not provide the final moral delineation of which people count and which do not."

Doesn't make all that much sense, does it?

And yet a global Medicare would do a hell of a lot of good in a lot of the world.

Insinuating that others are acting akin to racists or sexists is a good way to slip a bad argument in under the radar. I am fully in agreement with the first half of Cowen's column. I think the second half is an odd way to apply it (and again - this is coming from a guy who pretty much agrees on immigraiton policy).

I think this is just a convenient way to defend a policy that libertarians tend to like, but you wouldn't ever catch them using the same sort of logic to argue for policies that don't meet a prior libertarian test.

I see it as lazy thinking. If the world was equal, no one would care about immigration and no one would want to immigrate in net. The reason they focus on immigration is their inadequacy in addressing the former. What is the best way to promote a more equal world? I would put it that open immigration can retard this process, and while promoting a more equal world is more difficult, not having a vote in the process, it is more important to the actual goal.

Daniel, The idea of egalitarian cosmopolitanism is pretty standard in contemporary liberal-egalitarian political philosophy (see, e.g., Pogge, Kok-Chor Tan, Beitz, Caney; Singer is also cosmopolitan although not sure if "egalitarian" is accurate). This has been *the* hot topic over the last 20 years or so debates over justice: debate between cosmopolitan egalitarians vs. statist egalitarians ('statist' not meant in the negative tone used by anarchists).

There is a big difference which is that realistically, the United States is likely to only be able to implement a Medicare or Medicaid program within its borders (because of funding issues) and a US-only Medicare or Medicaid system has comparatively minor effects on people abroad. So it makes sense to approximate by only studying the effects in the US.

But let's say that Medicare or Medicaid has widespread significant negative effects on foreigners in the way that US immigration restrictions do. Then yes, I would say that ignoring those effects or valuing them as significantly less important than the effects on the domestic population is a sign of a racist-like nationalistic mentality.

"Voters have the moral right to vote their own selfish self interest."

I would disagree, and argue that if a plausible case can be made for legitimate democratic political authority, then such a case must include a condition requiring that voters vote according to their conception of justice (likely with a reasonable/justifiability constraint) and what is in the "common interests" of all those subject to the authority of the democratic decision. Voting in one's selfish self-interest will not meet these conditions, and anyone voting from such motives undermines the legitimacy of the decision.